Feb 8 Junk for Trump

Donald Trump supporters are the biggest consumers of junk news on Twitter and Facebook. That’s according to study of a group of some 13,500 politically-active US Twitter users, and 48,000 public Facebook pages conducted by the University of Oxford.

On Twitter, Trump supporters share 95% of the junk news sites under analysis, and accounted for 55% of such traffic in the entire sample. Other kinds of audiences shared content from these junk news sources, but at much lower levels, researchers say. On Facebook, hard conservatives share 91% of the junk news sites and accounted for 58% of junk news traffic overall.

The 90 sources of junk political news and information identified for the project produce content that includes “various forms of propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, and conspiratorial political information,” researchers say.

Actor Jim Carrey is quitting Facebook and selling his shares in the social network, and is urging others to delete their accounts.

“I’m dumping my @facebook stock and deleting my page because @facebook profited from Russian interference in our elections and they’re still not doing enough to stop it,” Carrey wrote online. “I encourage all other investors who care about our future to do the same.”